Pat Shortt, Anne-Marie Duff, Conor Ryan.

Running time: 85 minutes.

. . . . .

IN Lenny Abrahamson's Garage, the Irish director's second feature film after Adam and Paul, Pat Shortt does something unbelievable: he moves us. Shortt plays Josie, a simple petrol-pump attendant in smalltown Ireland.

He fuels his lonely life with chitchat on the pumps and fends off casual cruelties with an embarrassed laugh, as if he was in on the joke. He walks with his hands in front . . . like a dog fawning for some small kindness. But Josie is always on the back foot. Then a silly event tears his quiet life apart.

It would be so easy to overplay him. Yet Shortt doesn't. Where the comedian before traded laughs for broad caricature, here he displays a delicate sensitivity that is really quite moving. There are moments when Josie does nothing at all . . . he just sits on his bed and stares into empty space.

Yet Shortt is able to telegraph a well of sadness, a growing despair from these lonely exchanges with the camera. A quiet momentum builds; the plight that unfolds in Garage lived with me for weeks afterwards.

Josie is the type of man we know too well . . . the middle-aged village fool. The garage means everything to him: he lives in the back with a bed in a grubby kitchenette. He has no family and nobody you could call a friend . . . perhaps the English trucker who tells him about life on the continent; or the elderly gent who finds in Josie's non-judgemental silence some solace for his depression. The other people in his life make fun of him: there's Carmel (Anne-Marie Duff) who asks him if he's having a party when he buys bread, tuna and beans for his tea; or Breffni (Don Wycherley) who enjoys bullying Josie while he tries to soak a quiet pint.

Enter David (Conor Ryan), a slouchy teen given a summer job on the pumps. At first, David thinks Josie is soft. But then Josie's kindness reveals itself through glasses of Fanta and cans of beer. David begins to see how Josie can laugh at himself or be mesmerised by an evening sky.

And we too start to realise how Josie is not such an idiot after all . . . just a lonely, decent man battling for a little dignity from a pitiable existence and a litany of daily humiliations.

Garage earned its place at the Cannes director's fortnight and it is a major step for a new generation of Irish film. Its simplicity belies a wealth of detail: writer Mark O'Halloran tunes in to the parochial chat and we can hear how it is used to blanket silence.

While the camera, in simple blue tones, picks up the rhythms of smalltown life, gathering up other stories alongside Josie's that have been left by the rising tide of the boom: male suicide, declining country towns and the sundering of community. But its themes of loneliness and shame are universal.

In Adam and Paul, Abrahamson hinted at a distinctive vision.

But Garage is evidence of his maturing talent. He favours spareness, and moments of quiet revelation, often bookending scenes with shots of overcast skylines that root the story in place. He shows us the banal just long enough for us to discern what lies beneath.

Very often, the art of great film lies in showing rather than telling: Garage avoids the pitfall of stagey dialogue that clogs so many Irish films. It is a less-ismore philosophy that appeals very much to the big screen.

This style has been compared to that of Beckett and Aki Kaurismaki . . . the Finnish director who likes to sidle offbeat humour with downbeat, spare stories.

But Abrahamson is following a lineage that began with Robert Bresson. Still, he deserves his own 'Abrahamsonesque' term.

With the aid of his screenwriter, his preoccupation lies in an empathy with outsiders. He wants to show us the crushing nature of society's indifference and uses brutal tactics to make his point . . . Garage is designed to shock us out of our complacency.

This confrontation with the viewer was unrelenting in their RTE series Prosperity. In Garage it is leavened with a tragic humour.

I have heard fellow critics complain that Garage is depressing . . . as if stories that did not make us happy all the time are not worthy of our attention.

But that would also be to deny the breadth of feeling this film has, the honesty of its storytelling and the achievement of its filmmaking. There is a key moment on which this story hinges that, on first viewing, I was uncertain whether it justified what was to come. But a second viewing erased such doubts.

If Irish film wants to be respected abroad and if it wants to nurture talent that can compete on a serious level, then it has to start telling stories that are true to our own culture. Voice is everything.

Abrahamson and O'Halloran are leading the way in a voice that is loud and clear.